unforum

[lazy taurean]

Because they suck, that's why. And i suck at puzzles, so I don't want to starta different game. I have no life, so I might just wait for Silent's ARG to start.

[Silent|away]

[UnimportantHero]

naaah.

first of all, i was never committed to stopping the war or preventing deus city from happening. even in 2007 i was too invested in the people of deus city to prevent their very births. second of all, something tells me that is not what happened at all.

i messaged chris OOG asking him what is up. if i hear from him i will post it here.

[Nick the Wolf]

-ahem-

[Educated academic tone] You can't change the future, that's impossible. [/Educated academic tone] Silent and I will always disagree on this I'm afraid.

Keep us posted on the result of that message, I'd hate for it to be over.

[Silent|away]

[Nick the Wolf]

Fair enough.

[taureanfreak]

Well, if you can't change the future, then what's the point?!?!?!?!? I see no fun in not changing the future. The future and fate are things I try not too think too much about since it takes away from NOW. Live as you want and it'll all fall into place.

Ya, i've got nothing!

[UnimportantHero]

well...

okay.

[TGI Fridays]

[WolfHawk]

Ok Hook I think you should spill it. It looks like they're trying to wind this down what with all this new chapter crap. They've been so solidly behind the curtain that I don't think they'll tell us anything.

[Lazy Hook]

Well okay.

Basically speaking, at the beginning of Deus City the puppet masters thought that they would be able to find people who would invest money in the game the same way that some other games manage. This would have allowed their first game to be something pretty big and amazing. Unfortunately it just did not pan out like that, and so a combination of less time and greater financial concerns in their own lives led to the game suffering. Both of them are running businesses, obviously, and on top of that one puppet master has to contend with school and the other has to contend with raising a family.

So yeah, right now they are wrapping things up. I am actually pretty pleased with just how it is being wrapped up actually. The death of Tara Mercer actually made me cry a little bit. She was my favorite.

In any case... They are not with the idea of putting together an alternate reality game, not at all. If anything they feel that Deus City was a good learning experience for them and that they learned from their mistakes. From what I understand they will also be increasing the size of their team to help make everything move more smoothly the next time around. So I am personally looking forward to that coming along.

[WolfHawk]

Thanks, Hook. I can understand their concerns. However I don't see how they could attract investors with so much down time. Unless they started looking for them right from the start.

Oh well. Deus City was fun and it had a lot of potential. So we know the PMs can do good work. Let's see what happens.

[notgordian]

I'm assuming their plans were to do something along the lines of Perplex City, where a large enough userbase would have options to purchase things from the game. Whether or not this works isn't perfectly clear (it was tried VERY early on with "Majestic") but here are a couple of things they could have done if they maintained a large enough playerbase.

Puzzle Sales
-The TCoSA angle of the game involved mailings...those could have been sold to interesting players. Especially with the wood block puzzle, certain types encourage multiple people to buy since there's something physical involved
-Monetized access to the system--the assumption that white and gray districts have one level of access, and "premium" subscribers get access to blue, red, and beyond (or maybe just EARLY access)
-Purchasing Credits if you're too impatient to wait for interest to go up

Swag Sales
-Official, laminated Defense-Corp badges sold, possibly used as admission to official Deus City events (if live events took place)
-tshirts, coffee cups, DVDs of their filmed videos with extras

Sponsorship
-Google Ads: work in exciting stuff like mesothelioma into the plot so clickthroughs gain higher returns
-Approach companies for product placement integration, sponsorship credits, etc.
-Opening a section of the interface / game for trailheads (taking advantage of the multiple futures aspect of the game to broadcast "errors in the feed"

Licensing
-Licensing the game's backend out to other PMs if they wanted to do something similar but didn't necessarily want to go through the development time

There's a lot of stuff that's possible--not necessarily likely, but possible. As the folks at Fundi said, though, a lot of it depends on reaching that critical mass of players, and keeping them.